Update: I’m home, and safe, and about to go to Ken’s Donuts which at this point almost goes without saying. All told it was almost exactly 48 hours from when I left my house in Beijing to when I touched down in Austin, and right now I couldn’t be happier. I’ve got a lot of thank-yous and wrapping ups to do, but again — donuts call, so for the time being I’ll leave you with this little rant on culture shock and nationalism that I wrote up during my four-hour layover in Houston this afternoon. At the time of writing and even now I’m more than a little exhausted so take it with a grain of salt. Oh and to my Chinese friends/coworkers reading, if you think the categorization of China is unfair in any way I wholeheartedly welcome criticism, comments, debate, etc.

~~~

Coming back through Houston elicited some weird feelings. There’s always going to be reverse culture shock with this sort of thing, sure, but before when I came through Chicago it seemed a lot milder.
Houston’s just more, eh, red-blooded-’murican than the windy city. And by this of course I refer to the presence of fat people, who are everywhere here and nowhere in Asia. That whole “sure we will put you in a wheelchair simply because you are fat and do not feel like walking around the airport” bullshit was something that I would have been happy to forget actually happened, for instance.
On the other side of it though, Houston isn’t different ENOUGH. I’ve just come from a one-party controlled security state into the Land of the Free and the first — I kid you not, the very first — announcement that I hear over the PA is about how if you joke about security procedures you will be arrested.
C’mon now, guys. Also the fact that Houston is one of the most populated cities in the States (and each person takes up relatively more volume) means that the whole ‘I am awash in a sea of people” effect hasn’t gone anywhere. Except that now I can overhear and understand all the random chatter around me; honestly it’s a little overwhelming. I’ve become pretty accustomed to really needing to focus one on speaker at a time to get comprehension but now I’m picking up snippets of three or four inane conversations at once and I almost wish that I couldn’t.

Despite this, though, there’s a reason why this country is my favorite one on the planet and I’m not sure it’s necessarily a function of being born here. My last few days in particular have highlighted that.
China and Japan are pretty much opposites — China is developing, chaotic, and boisterous. It pretty much lacks rule of law (for those with money, at least) in a lot of ways; overall it just comes off as raw and exciting, which is why it appeals to me. But as a developing country it comes with all the faults that that entails, especially with regard to just getting basic shit done; every experience is an uphill battle. From roads packed with more and more new drivers who have NO idea what they’re doing — and from what I gather from Hessler, neither the system nor the drivers themselves is improving in the slightest — to local political systems so riddled with corruption that they’re functionally unable to improve the quality of life for a huge number of people there is something about the country that is clearly very, very broken. Several coworkers and Chinese people I met who I independently asked about the state of development and the sustainability of the country’s current way of operating compared it to a sick patient who nobody knows how to cure. The problems are simply too myriad, pervasive, and interconnected to be systematically addressed. Look at the “guanxi” system of business, look at the opaque and frankly oppressive government, look at local debt and corruption; these are the very worst that China has to offer, and these are the most powerful forces in the country.

Now admittedly, I know substantially less about Japan than I do about China, but I’ve visited the country for a combined three or so weeks and I hear plenty about it from Connor, who loves comparing it to China because on paper it’s “better” by pretty much any metric you’d care to pick. That’s mainly because it’s developed and organized and well-run in every way that the middle kingdom is not. Look at yesterday’s earthquake, for instance – the last tally I heard counted deaths in the thousands. You put an 8.9 earthquake in China and you will not have 4-figure deaths. You will have six, maybe seven figure deaths especially if you put it near a coast so that you have tsunamis hitting dozens of cities. Japan is one of the most educated and efficient countries as you could ever ask for. But culturally — to me — there’s something missing. The trade-off in Japan for having everything neat and orderly, for things working when they’re supposed to work and people doing what they’re supposed to do is that you sacrifice everything that makes China fun. You can’t be loud and drunk on the street without shaming yourself (unless you’re old), you can’t find insane hole-in-the-wall stores that violate a million healthcodes but sell delicious kung-pao chicken in Tokyo. You couldn’t lie your way past world exhibition doors or try to bribe someone and be laughed away. That’d be against the rules in a county where rules matter. The important thing here is that these flaws are subjective; they aren’t actual problems but rather just the reasons why I’d rather study Mandarin than Japanese.

America, though, has the best of both worlds. We’re rich and developed and enjoy all the benefits that that confers, just as the Japanese do (aside from healthcare, where they’re kicking our asses but hey). But we also are loud and rowdy and shameless and spontaneous; America is a lot of things but culturally boring or stagnating is not one of them. There’s a reason the whole world has its eye on the states; there’s a reason our music and food and pop-culture, intolerable as the latter may be, are ubiquitous. We’re the greatest country in the world, dammit.
U.S.A.
U.S.A.
U.S.A.
God it’s good to be home.

5 Comments:

There’s hole in the wall chinese food in japan too, though. it’s just in Chinatown.

Taibbi and ames made the argument in the late 90s that they felt more free in Russia after the collapse of the USSR than they had in the US, because rules could be bent with bribes and so on. I think that by that standard, on a day-to-day basis, living in China could feel substantially more free than the US, if you exclude issues relating to political speech. I am pretty sure that’s what you’re lamenting here.

I reeeallly don’t buy your analysis of how the US is the “best of both worlds.” I would contend the opposite: you get none of japan’s efficiency and willingness to sacrifice individual good for the collective good, and you get none of the opportunities and freedoms birthed from the ruthless, intensely creative Chinese desire for growth.

I think the fact that China is desperately starving for innovation across to board while America is known for it almost exclusively would indicate otherwise. They’re ruthless and creative, sure, but nearly all of that energy currently goes into violating IP rights and stealing other people’s technology. So if your opportunities are only to do what other people have done before, you may as well just go to the source of what the chinese are busy trying to copy if you have the mobility and money to do so.

And while it’s certainly harder in the states to sacrifice to the collective good, my argument was more along the lines of like, if you book a hotel room, said hotel room will probably exist, and they will let you into it. Very basic services operate how they are supposed to.

PS i forgot that tokyo had a chinatown. to me that concept is really funny, for some reason. like austin having a ‘canadatown’ or a ‘mexicotown’ when in reality at least the latter is highly assimilated into the city as a whole and would be weird to isolate off to one specific section.
also, didnt you get your wallet stolen in chinatown? or was that SF’s chinatown?

Yeah but violating IP rights and stealing technology is just what happens when countries industrialize. There’s a relatively high degree of education in math and science, there’s a lot of money coming in, and there’s a high reward for entrepreneurship.

There’s already lots of innovation occurring in industrial-tech and clean-tech; the Chinese are light years ahead of us in terms of developing and adopting low-energy air conditioning and widescale solar power. In contrast, the big “innovative” American company right now is Facebook, which is a website where girls post photographs of themselves and boys look at them.

Ouch dont get your Houston undies in a bundle just because you missed Michael the Balloon Maestro (http://yfrog.com/h629mkaj) handing out free balloons buddies 9am-1pm in Terminals A-C, he’s a nice guy.

Also there’s a legitimate (and somewhat humerous) story behind why they have to make that annoucement in the terminal now. If you go to Hobby we dont have any annoucements just ambient music or throwback Christmas songs! We were voted the nation’s friendliest airport and we’re getting the new jumbo planes soon!